Clementine: Freeing millions of women to go from I can't to I can

The untold story of how one woman's mental health crisis led her to create a revolutionary mindset company for women.

Meet Kim Palmer founder of Clementine, a company on a mission to free women from unhelpful thoughts, feelings & expectations.

Kim's very personal crisis led her to champion mental well-being and create a movement for women. Clementine is reimagining mental health and paving the way for digital therapeutics. Kim risked it all as the main breadwinner, giving up her well-paid job in strategy to follow her dreams. 

Key Takeaways

- Expansion and growth: Explore Clementine's strategic shift from an App to a mindset company

- Founder well-being: Kim discusses the critical role of self-care, the power of trusting one's intuition, and maintaining emotional well-being amid the demands of startup life

- The Importance of Customer Discovery: How to effectively use customer insights to validate your business model, fuel growth and build an engaged community

Have questions about this episode? Ask our hosts, chat now via our website

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Oh

Kim Palmer: 0:09

this is always a bit triggering. So just sort of bear with me for this. Even though it was a really long time ago, it was about 10 years ago now that I had a mental health break down.

Dr Becky Sage: 0:24

You're listening to find it and grounded with Ollie collard and Dr. Becky sage. The podcast brings you the honest realities of startup life. If you're a founder or aspiring entrepreneur, this is for you. We know running a business can be lonely and tough at times. And we want to help you get ahead with simple tips and sound advice. Every fortnight we hear inspiring stories from an early stage business owner, who's only a couple of steps ahead of you, talking about what they've learned. And as your hosts, we share our insights and experiences as founders so you can apply this to your own business. Hello, I'm Dr. Becky sage, and I am co host of the founded and grounded Podcast. I'm here today, as always with Ali. Hi, Ali. How are you this week? Very

Ollie Collard: 1:18

well. Thank you. We had a nice easter bank holiday, which was great. I think the kids are still recovering from the overconsumption of chocolate and coming down off their high but no, it was nice to have quite a few days off and back into the swing of things. What about you?

Dr Becky Sage: 1:34

Yeah, very good. I'm also recovering from the overconsumption of chocolate. Actually, I think I mentioned on the podcast before I did a gymnastics competition over Easter. So I competed at the weekend. So actually, the chocolate was kind of well deserved, I

Ollie Collard: 1:49

think I think so how did you get on? Yeah,

Dr Becky Sage: 1:52

I was really happy with that when I'm doing a lot of warm up competitions. Because I'm competing internationally in Boston later on this year, the Masters World Cup, so very much warm up to kind of hit all the goals that I wanted to for this competition, which is all you can really ask awesome stuff, actually. So who is it we're talking to this week?

Ollie Collard: 2:12

We have got a very inspirational guest on the podcast this week, Becky, so I caught up with Kim, who is founder of a business called Clementine. They're an impact business on a mission to free women from unhelpful thoughts, feelings and expectations. Yeah, this

Dr Becky Sage: 2:28

is a challenge we've talked about a few times on the on the podcast and it kind of focuses on it in a slightly different way in this episode. So let's dive straight in and hear about Kim's story and how that led to the formation of Clementine.

Ollie Collard: 2:47

Kim Good morning. How you doing?

Kim Palmer: 2:49

Good morning. I am very well Ollie. Thank you. How are you?

Ollie Collard: 2:53

Very well. Thank you. I have to say I'm glad we're getting to you know, the last time we were obviously put off by the train strike. So thank you for bearing with us and rearranging as well. much appreciate it so

Kim Palmer: 3:04

good. I'm happy to be here.

Ollie Collard: 3:06

Excellent. I have to say your accent puts me at home. Forgetting I've got an accent. I should say Kiora because my old man's a kiwi actually. Yeah, and he's, I've been lucky to go back there three or four times. Um, he was actually raised in Palmerston North where I believe you went to university.

Kim Palmer: 3:25

Well, I actually went to Massey. It has two campuses, Palmerston or parmi. And also in Auckland, but I do know, Palmerston North very, very well. Excellent.

Ollie Collard: 3:38

Firstly, I want to dig in a bit to the genesis for Clementine, it came about after a big personal problem that you were facing. Can you send me back to those moments where you are having those panic attacks? And how does that lead to you founding Clementine? Yeah,

Kim Palmer: 3:54

this is always a bit triggering. So just sort of bear with me for this. Even though it was a really long time ago, it was about 10 years ago now that I had a mental health breakdown or crisis, whatever you want to call it, which looked like what you're saying I was having panic attacks basically on a daily basis. It's easy to look back in hindsight and figure out well, why did that happen at the time, I had no idea what was going on. But basically, when I became pregnant with my first son, I just I almost chose to ignore being pregnant. I was at that time like a complete workaholic, perfectionist on a scale of one to 10 My perfectionist levels were you know, a 10 I was trying to be that Superwoman, that kind of like boss babe, which is just total rubbish now. I realise and you know, one of those people who had to have their shit together, excuse my French all the time, except underneath all of that. I didn't kind of have my shit together. I felt so much anxiety and it all came to a head when I was pregnant basically with my I first panic attack at work. To cut a very long story short, I sort of, you know, went into a cave for about a couple of years when I was on maternity leave, I thought life would get better. But it actually didn't, I obviously didn't realise what it was gonna be like to have a baby. That's hard enough as it is that my confidence levels and I sort of went like into sort of a sort of a vision. And my head is a deep dark cave, I couldn't even go out and speak to people or even have dinner with my family. That's how bad it was. However, I needed to get some help. I hadn't even told my husband, he was forget that, I think for about a year, he, he had no idea because I was living in this world of having to keep my shit together and pretending that I was the Superwoman. But when I became redundant, while I was on maternity leave, I had to go out and find a new job. Now, those who know, you know, interviewing for a job as like, you've got to have Uber confidence, don't you? And it became very clear that I did not have that at that time. So I needed help. So I sought help through talking therapy, you know, one on one face to face, that kind of didn't really work for me. And if we sort of rewind back in time, as well, this was a time when meditation and mindfulness became massive. And everyone was like, why don't you just meditate, you know, you need to be more mindful. And I was like, I remember buying the first mindfulness book. And I literally threw it out because I was like, my brain was just so mega wired that was just so far from being accessible to me. Same with meditation, so it didn't work. Anyway, I just chance meeting with a friend with a woman who often I think women have a sort of sixth sense for what's going on without you even saying that something's going on. And she introduced me to hypnotherapy. And I had my first, you know, in real life session with a hypnotherapist, Georgia. Foster is her name, and she was the first voice behind Clementine. And honestly, it was like, a poison was being sucked out of my body just after one session. But you know it, you can't fix a lifelong, you know, habits in one session. So I saw her for about a year and started to feel like I was retraining my brain. This is quite a long story. So I'll try and cut it short again. And I wasn't thinking of starting a business at that point, I was just, you know, helping myself nurturing myself getting better. But when I was at work, I worked for a really big advertising company, and I was a strategy director there. And I started to really lean into talking about my anxiety and having panic attacks. And not always having Uber confidence, which kinda is the currency to get ahead in a lot of certain scenarios, right in life. When I started to do that, it was so interesting, because all the women that my work would, I mean, genuinely, like all of them, would come and talk to me and say, I feel like that. But I feel like that too. And I just had this sense of people suffering, but in silence. And I just kept thinking to myself, I think I can do something about this. I think I've found something. And that's kind of the genesis behind and then there's a whole nother journey of where it all kind of came from.

Ollie Collard: 8:28

Well, thank you for being so open and honest that Kim as well about your your struggles at that time. Yeah, but a lot of businesses are started from that personal experience. Yeah, trying to solve a problem for so it was as an entrepreneur, yes. How does it then go from that idea to transforming it into a commercial business? Yeah,

Kim Palmer: 8:48

well, that's, I mean, I still on the journey. I don't think I've been that successful in doing that yet. But it went from this kind of like kernel of an idea in my head to the because I was a strategist. So I was like, very planned and organised about how I was going to form my thoughts. So I did all of that. And I decided I made a very conscious decision when I was working to lean out of work. My bosses probably won't like that at the time. But I did I thought, I need to do something else that is not just about work. So I started building Clementine off the side of my desk, and my weekends at my evenings. It just became this passion project. I convinced my husband that we should spend all of our life savings like literally everything that wasn't a huge amount of money. But it was everything that we had, because he just he knew he was like, I think you're onto something here. And I didn't build it to start with it was the very first step was just to talk to women. I spoke to 100 Women face to face. I didn't even have a solution. I just wanted to understand with them. I said talk me through your day, from the morning through to the evening. Were all the pain points, were you really stressed, like, what's going on? And then I started to build it up in my head. And then I started to I did the classic thing of writing a PowerPoint presentation of what this thing was in my head. So I could start sharing it with people just to get little bits of feedback, what do you think? Is this something that you think would be interesting, I just kept getting so much positive feedback. So then I spent seven months, building this and pulling in all the different people that I knew. So I mean, it's an app, right? So I've got no idea how to build an app. But what I do know is lots of people. So I use my network really well to bring in all different types of people to build this thing that was in my head. And I launched in 2017, it was, which seems like such a long time ago, right? Onto the App Store. And I say launch, there was no big launch party, it was just few buttons is live. And I just, it wasn't a business, I think that was it was so much fun. It was also healing me at the same time. And I think part of that was just, the important part of that was that it wasn't a business, if you know what I mean, it was like, I'm just learning how to build everything from ground upwards. And then if I fast forward, it was in 2019, I still have my job, I was running this off the side of my desk, having so much fun and got the community to 50,000 Women at that point, without any spending any money on marketing, so we didn't have any money, I didn't realise how much it was gonna cost to keep running this thing. And that's when we sort of hit a new kind of point in the journey, which was, okay, I think I'm onto something, I really think I'm onto something, we've got enough feedback and data points. If we're going to scale this, it needs money. And that's when COVID happen. But I did manage to raise money in I think it was 2020. Through our current impact investors, it was the family office, and that kind of set us off into a new direction. Really? Excellent. I'm

Ollie Collard: 12:07

gonna ask a bit more about your funding journey later on, because that's really interesting. I just wanted to also ask about a lot of people actually miss that step of doing that customer engagement piece and going out and speaking to, you know, 100 plus people and asking them about their pain points, and not even mentioning the business. So yeah, what advice would you give to somebody who's got an idea? Yeah, but is maybe afraid of going out to the marketplace.

Kim Palmer: 12:31

I mean, you can't, you can't be afraid. And even I didn't want I didn't mention there was that there was a step even before that, which was is this the pain point that I want to solve, I made a list of all the different problems. And you've got to spend so much time in the problem space, right before you even get to a solution and see where your energy is for it as well. Because if you're going to dedicate Fritchie do your whole life like You're like every waking sleeping hour to it, you have to have the continued energy to keep going. So I had a list of about 50 problems. And I weighed them all out. And I was like, this is the problem that I want to solve. So it just went deep. And so I would say you if you miss that part, unless you're super lucky. I think you might end up with the wrong solution, because you've just jumped too quickly.

Ollie Collard: 13:27

So Kim, there's lots of apps out there. So I will not understand what makes you guys unique and different to everybody else.

Dr Becky Sage: 13:34

Yes,

Kim Palmer: 13:35

there are lots of apps out there. I think there's actually so many things that make us different. So first of all, we don't say that we're our company is an app, we are a mindset company. So we've elevated what we do beyond just the app. But if we stick with the app for a minute, the fact that we are pretty much the only female focused, mental well being app on the market, everyone else has gone for everybody in terms of their audience. And because of that I you know, I have had some investors go Oh, you're niching down, it's like, well, we all know the answer to that is that we're half the population. So it's not niche. But it allows you to tailor the product so much more. So for example, we're just about to launch loads of series, a series around menstrual your menstrual cycle. We have menopause, even just the way that it looks and the words that we use. If you asked a woman who's using the app, what they say, they say this feels like it's for me, I feel like they're inside my head. So I'd rather be something to someone than to try to be something to everybody. So that's kind of what makes it different. And then there's another really big part which is around the type of health. We call it a health intervention. that we use. There are a lot of apps out there who use meditation. We don't use meditation, it's because it was something that I couldn't get on with. And when I spoke to all those women, you know, at the beginning 100 of them, most of them weren't using meditation, because they were too busy and couldn't carve out the time they couldn't practice it. And with hypnotherapy, you don't need to do that you get instant release with no burden. But feel like you're almost being cradled. So we felt like That was super different. And it's Yeah, I think the price as well as is very, very accessible. So yeah, I love that.

Ollie Collard: 15:38

And for people maybe not aware of the differences between meditation and hypnotherapy? Could you just give me a very layman history? Yes.

Kim Palmer: 15:47

I always do it in layman's term, I think for for most of the people, we talk to the women, they describe meditation as a lean in experience, one where you still have to be active in the process, which can be very hard, right? With hypnotherapy, it's a lean back experience, we help you to relax immediately, you know, we're living in a world where people don't even know how to relax anymore. And so you disarms you completely. And then what happens is, we never leave you alone, whereas with meditation you're left with, with your own thoughts, you know, etc. We're constantly talking with you. So you feel like you're supported the whole way through. And I think that's the thing, it's like, it's almost like your best friend is just like having a little chat with you. And because of that, that's what they say. It feels like it's just washing over me and see pink like, see, this? Is the language like seeping into me versus me feeling like, Oh, my God. Right, what was I thinking? What was I thinking? It's just very easy. Yeah.

Ollie Collard: 16:54

So improving the emotional well being of millions of women. Why is this mission so important? And what difference would it ultimately make?

Kim Palmer: 17:03

Well, it's important to me, because of the origins of my own, you know, my own problems that I've had, but also the fact that I can just see even today, you know, back then I could, I had that awakening of seeing so many women suffering. And I think it's gotten worse, hasn't actually got any better. And I just think that as women, if you sort of break it down to another level, you go, but why is that important? Because we are the glue that sticks, so many parts of society together, if you just think about a household, you know, even my husband will say this, when you're happy, we're all happy. You know, when I'm feeling good, we all feel good. And that's so true. You can care and nurture for more people, etc. And then it just goes on and on and on. And on and on. Because we're connectors, right. So I think it is, you know, it is important. And there's such a gap, there's so many gaps, you know, I could list off all the health gaps, the sleep gaps, the, you know, pay gap, the pension gap, the so imagine if we were all operating at our full, like real full potential, and that's different for everybody. It's not about being the CEO of a company. That's not what I'm saying. Then just, I mean, imagine what what the world would look like, if we were

Ollie Collard: 18:26

so amazing. Can you paint a picture of that world and what it would look

Kim Palmer: 18:29

Ah, it would just be I mean, my mantra for this year is free to be me, right. And I really feel that this year, I'm flourishing. And anything is possible. And that means that I'm stepping in to doing so many things. So you can imagine a world I've got a picture in my head of this, I'm quite a visual person. So almost like an army, but not an aggressive Army of Women banding together to make change. It happened this week, actually, you know, with the changes to the angel investing, right? And I was part of that group of women. Today. Hopefully, that change will happen. And honestly, it's really given me hope. I'm like, when we get together, we're all stepping into our full potential. We can basically do anything. And that's just one tiny thing that we might change. Yeah,

Ollie Collard: 19:19

I love that. I mean, Becky and I have discussed it at length on the podcast already over the last couple of episodes, but I'm so glad that you and a collection of people have come together to join Air Force that change and get it revoked because I think it's gonna it would have had disastrous consequences. Yeah, was implemented

Kim Palmer: 19:36

not even just for women. It would have been for everybody. Yeah, absolutely agree.

Ollie Collard: 19:41

Kim, I read about some interesting concepts, which I'd love to get the full understanding behind. So the first the first one is body acceptance. The second striving for nothing. And lastly, I can't too I can do Can you talk me through those? Yeah.

Kim Palmer: 20:02

Okay, so body acceptance this is. So most people understand. I think today, this idea of body positivity. We started to talk about this with our community a couple of years ago, and realise that for so many women, body positivity was still so far out of their reach, which I thought was really interesting, even though you like, Oh, yeah. But on a day to day practical level, it just becomes another thing to do on your to do list and it's just gone. Right? So we, we believe that there's a step should is actually two steps before that. One, which is just to respect your body. Right? And that is to basically say thank you to your body. You know, like, I'm feeling a little bit rundown at the moment. So this week, I'm really leaning into you know, saying thank you to my hands, and like really moisturising them, and go and go cheese, they really do work really hard for me, you know, stuff like that, just like basic respect, rather than hating on it. And then the next step is if you can respect, then you might actually start to just accept that this is the only body you've caught. Right? I know, it sounds. So it sounds so ridiculous. But we're just like, we have this constant narrative. And I hadn't, it's not our thoughts from the noise that comes from the world around us, that we're trying to live up to some sort of like idealistic view of what our bodies should look like. But if we just learn to live in our own skin, and accept that this is it, this is it, and stop trying to like force it and tweak it and did it, then actually, we might feel positive about it anyway, but not think about feeling positive about it, if that makes sense. There's too much pressure

Ollie Collard: 21:44

100% And then striving for nothing, it's the same kind of

Kim Palmer: 21:47

thing. Like, I have realised looking back that I was constantly striving in all aspects of life. So striving for balance, you know, everyone's like, Oh, you just need a bit more balance, or striving for success, or, you know, striving to look amazing or whatever. And me, taking all of that striving out of the picture, and actually just focusing on being okay, on a day to day basis is actually revolutionary to you feeling happy, and content, etc. So I think if we society, if we just stopped striving for all those things, will probably be feel a lot heavier, not heavier. Lighter, heavier, exactly. Lighter.

Ollie Collard: 22:37

And lastly, the mindset behind I can't to I can, yeah,

Kim Palmer: 22:40

again, this is an again, comes from me, but it's true of so many people I see around me this, this it's an inner belief, feeling of, you know, worry of about your confidence to do things. So, we revert to a but I can't do that are no, right? No, or maybe a lot, you know, do you know what I mean? And what we do is we shift that mindset, and it could be I can't go to sleep, I can't go to that podcast, I can't go to London, I'm too tired, or I can't put my hand up in that meeting. Because I'm embarrassed or I can't wear that dress, or, you know, I can't go for that promotion. There's so many icons. And what we do is help to shift that, which is all foundational stuff, right? This is deep, deep work stuff from believing that you can't to really believing that you can do anything that you put your mind to. And again, a lot of this is not our fault. Like there's no judgement with any of this. This is because of the world we live in. And we just have to learn to shut it all out. And then that helps to take a lot of noise out and then you reach tune back into who you always were, and realise that when you were born, you can do anything. And today when you're 45 you can do anything word about our sponsors. The

Dr Becky Sage: 24:11

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Ollie Collard: 26:08

I think you were I think some days being a founder, you can have those days where you're feeling invincible, unstoppable, that you can take on the world. And then you've got those other days and everything really just feeling flat, and nothing seems to be moving. You can't get the motivation, you can't get focused, but it's about on those days where you're not feeling your best is about setting realistic goals and chipping away at them. And just bearing in mind that actually you might not be on top of your performance that day. And that's okay.

Dr Becky Sage: 26:37

And I think knowing your limitations is also a really powerful thing to do as well. Yes, you can do everything. But you may need to bring in some other people to help you get to that point. So Mike, creating mindset shifts is a big theme in terms of what Clementine is there to do. And what Kim what Kim demonstrated that she has done and what she's worked with other women to do. And of course, we talk about this on the podcast all the time. I think founder mindset is a really strong underpinning theme that we have through pretty much all of our episodes, don't worry. So how do you think mindset plays into your job as a founder or an entrepreneur,

Ollie Collard: 27:17

I would go as far to say it's one of the biggest factors that will determine your success or not, I would say the most biggest hardest competitor that everybody has every farm the houses themselves. And if you can reframe your thinking to get your mindset, right, then it's going to put you in such a good place to be able to tackle those inevitable challenges that will come along the way. And if you can reframe all of that think positively, to think of abundance to think that anything is possible, and there is a solution out there, you just might need to speak to the right person, then that's going to set you up for success and entrepreneurship.

Dr Becky Sage: 27:57

I thought it was really interesting that Kim said that every single woman that she'd spoken to had this challenge around confidence. And it was such a, it was a story that we've heard time and time again, it's certainly been my experience both personally. But in terms of talking to my networks as well, you just hear the same thing over and over again about this lack of confidence. And back when I was doing my first business, I started to again, this the rational analytical part of me started to kind of break down what what it actually meant to have confidence. And I realised that confidence is really a layer that sits on top of a couple of other things first, first and foremost, it's your self worth. Like I think you just have to have that real underpinning belief that like, I deserve to be able to say I can I deserve to be able to like dream I deserve if I'm in a difficult situation to be able to work to get out of that situation. And I think that that's often missing from many people. And then there's the layer of self esteem. And for me that is all about kind of living your values, and doing things every day where you feel like you're showing up as kind of as yourself and doing things in the way that you think they should be done, which I often think is a limitation that is put on us by kind of the people we're around or the organisations that we're working in. Sometimes we show up all the time. And we feel like we can't even live to our values. And I think that really impacts our self esteem. And then I feel like confidence is the thing that sort of comes on top of that. And that's about that real kind of inherent trust in yourself and in the situations that you're in. So sometimes you need to work through all those different layers to be able to get to that confidence point. It's a

Ollie Collard: 29:38

really good way of thinking about it in terms of that methodology. And I think to get confidence, you've got to believe in yourself first and foremost. But also just have the mindset that actually you can work anything out. It's going to be okay. You might not come up with the solution instantly, but hard problems require lots of hard thinking and And that doesn't come overnight. And I think the more social proof that you see in yourself, and the importance then of obviously looking back and reminding yourself about all the obstacles that you have overcome, then that that builds that confidence and resilience in yourself. I mean, I really hate it when you see founders who actually come across really capable, competent, confident, but they don't believe it themselves. And so sometimes, if they don't believe it themselves, There's this slight kind of red flag or something that's slightly missing from the puzzle that sometimes people intuitively pick up on. And if they solve that for themselves, then the results they would deal to be much higher.

Dr Becky Sage: 30:43

Yeah, I feel like I went on that journey. Definitely. It's not something you do overnight, actually, mindset shifts are, these are such ingrained habits, that you actually do have to be patient in terms of the shift. But it's also if you do just change things maybe on a daily basis, or every time you catch yourself thinking in a certain way, to start to shift the way that you are thinking that can take you to that place. And I know for me, I just woke up one day, and I'm like, Oh, I am confident. Now I do have, I've built that social proof. And I've kind of had to build up the confidence throughout that time. And, and suddenly you look back and you're like, huh, that did work. Doing a gratitude diary every day for three years, did start to give me a better outlook on the world. And

Ollie Collard: 31:31

you've got to have that that faith, like you say that it is going to come eventually. But as you say, it doesn't happen overnight. And most things actually happen very subtly, and you don't actually necessarily realise the change when it's taking place. So it's this constant iteration and these marginal gains that will put you in really strong positioning in the future with your own self belief and confidence. But it doesn't come overnight. And I think that's the main point. And on that note, as well, I always recommend a book by James clear, called atomic habits. And he talks about the concept of the power of tiny gains. So if you are 1%, better every day, that will compound over time, and over the course of a year, you will be 37.78% Better than you were at the start of the year. However, if you're 1% worse every day, then you're kind of dropped by about point zero 3% over the course of that year. So I think that that concept of right you don't have to be doing massive changes every day and completely throwing yourself outside your comfort zone. It's about making those small changes that add up and compound over time.

Dr Becky Sage: 32:41

I think as entrepreneurs, we can be a bit impatient sometimes. And we want to see those results immediately. And I think you said you've got to have belief in yourself, you've got to have faith that what you're doing is going to play out even when you can't necessarily see those results. And I think that is true for business as well, we have to have faith that the work we're doing right now is going to pay off even if we can't see it right now. And talking of that, I think that the next thing I wanted to bring up that Kim spoke about very clearly. And I think because she talked about the fact that she's comes from a strategy background, she thinks very clearly, she described her, you know, this whole thing around not jumping in too quickly. And I think by doing a lot of the groundwork that really enabled her to grow in a way that has now paid off for the business. So in particular, she talks about having time in the problem space, how important is this as part of the entrepreneurial journey, if you're

Ollie Collard: 33:38

running headfirst into a business and not taking the time to really understand the layers of your target audience, then the ultimately the solution that you build isn't going to be as good as it can be. And often, there probably won't be a need for it because you haven't understood the fundamentals of the problem that you're trying to solve. So I absolutely love this from Kim, I think that more people should do this. I mean, it obviously took her a long time to spend sort of two years deeply researching the problem space and engaging with so many women. But I think ultimately, that's put her in a great position that she's in now. She knows inside out in a very deep and profound way, like how her community think how they act, what their intentions are, what are their insecurities, what makes them nervous, what do they get excited about? Only by having this really deep understanding? Was she able to bring this meaningful solution to the marketplace? So although it took time, I think ultimately the the end product is so much better and so much stronger.

Dr Becky Sage: 34:44

Yeah, she showed that patients we were just talking about in the in the early days so that she could get to know those customers. I think sometimes people can find it hard not to take a solution to the market. And I guess we often see and this is very much generalising. But we often see either product focused or market focused entrepreneurs. And I think if you're quite product minded, and that's where you've come from, it can be really hard not to just try and solve that problem straight away and come and propose a solution to someone when actually, if you can be patient, and you can do that listening, you're much more likely to develop a smarter solution that this audience is going to really need exactly

Ollie Collard: 35:26

back in, it's about getting that data set to ensure that you've got enough information to be able to analyse, so obviously speaking to 100, plus women understanding all of those problems, you know, putting all of those problems into categories into trends, picking out the common thread, there is one of the key parts of the the customer problem space that you really need to engage with. So if you're listening to this, and you're potentially thinking of going into business, then I would definitely say it's is time well spent. And

Dr Becky Sage: 35:58

guess what, this is something you can do without any investor money, like without any revenue coming in, you can go and talk to people, even if you were to, you know, carve out half an hour a day to talk to somebody 10 minutes a day, you know, it's going to make a big difference, you can make big inroads and understand your audience much more quickly. And because Kim did this, they were able to get to this point where they ended up having 50,000 women, before they'd even brought in any kind of investment. So let's hear a little bit more about where they went after they were able to get that 50,000 women in their community.

Kim Palmer: 36:40

I'm quite honest about my fundraising journey. So at the beginning, I literally had no idea of what I was doing. I, I honestly felt like I was going to describe it is like there was a black door, right. And there's a key. And if you get the key, that's cool. You open the door to this world of fundraising. But everybody's foreign, speaking a different language. And looking at you like you're weird. That's how I felt. When I was fundraising, and I had a failed attempt at it at first, and I sort of, I didn't really know what I was doing, right. So my journey, I think one of the reasons why I was successful, or not only because of me in my business. But it's because I decided to use an introducer. So I met a guy called Malin who I talk about all the times he's an investor in our business. And he basically coached me through you know, what, here's the key Kim. Here's the language that everybody is speaking here, rewriting my pitch deck. So it wasn't the story that I wanted to tell, which was the story that the investors wanted to hear, which was completely different, by the way, which I found really difficult to get my head around. And I found it really stressful. I had so many panic attacks it, I just put myself under so much pressure, because not the narrative, but the fact that women, you know, we were barely getting any, it's slightly improved. But back then it was way worse. I didn't know anyone either. I didn't know any other women who'd received money. So there were no like proof points or people to talk to. So I put myself under so much pressure. And Malin just he came to all my meetings with me because he knew that I was like super stressed about this. However, timing is everything. I do believe timing plays a massive part of this, obviously, you've got to get your bits together. But I was at sort of an intersection of a lot of really big macro things going on, which was the rise of female entrepreneurs. Mental Health, I was the very early sort of days of that. I had traction, right, I had proven traction. We didn't we weren't making money. But we had a community of 50,000 women at that point which proved and I had I and I've always had this such a strong vision for what what I wanted this to be, which actually has never, never really changed. And so I remember so clearly that meeting we we actually we'd mapped out a strategy for fundraising, which was angels, and then crowdfunding and then VCs and we did all of those sort of, you know, early days talking to all of them, but very quickly got an offer from Fortunatus. He didn't make me pitch. Justin, the head of the firm, he could see that I was nervous. Put your laptop away can just talk to me, talk to me about your business and offered me the money in that meeting. Which was really quite overwhelming.

Ollie Collard: 39:54

Very refreshing to actually hear that story. Yeah, he's just actually gone. Look Just forget about the laptop. Yeah, just talk to me.

Kim Palmer: 40:02

I know. And I actually think he's, he's amazing. I do believe that that whole industry needs to change. I don't think we should be pitched. I have some quite strong views about this. I think the pitching days are ridiculous. You spent a lot of time building something. It's almost a bit sort of patronising and derogatory to what you've built, and why should I pitch? I feel like it should just be more of a conversation. And not everybody is good at pitching. Right. But that doesn't mean that you don't have a great business. So yeah,

Ollie Collard: 40:30

what else do you feel needs to happen and responsibility of the investment ecosystem to help better prepare founders for their kind of investment readiness?

Kim Palmer: 40:41

Well, what I would say, is this a slightly different way of approaching your question, I think there's a lot of people who don't even enter the arena. I know so many women who are scared to go into, you know, getting investment. I've got an amazing businesses, by the way, and I'm like, Oh, my God, imagine if you just, you did that. Because the whole ecosystem doesn't look like it's for them. So it's, so it requires a huge overhaul. And it's big stuff, right? You need more women investors. So that you think, Oh, well, there's people like me here as well, the whole way the whole language needs to change. It's a bit like banking, you know, that's had to go through a whole refresh as well, to make it feel like it's more accessible and less of the ridiculous terms that no one understands, you need a glossary for, you shouldn't need a glossary for the stuff. Even this idea of pitching again, like, that's only cert, you'll get 5% of people going through that process, because they feel confident enough to pick. And I remember being at an event where the guy was like, Well, women aren't confident enough to really piss me off. And I was like, Well, maybe you haven't created an environment, maybe your process, it means that they're not coming forward. So I think they need to rethink that as well. Even the pitch decks, like sometimes I think it's just such a waste of time. You know, just go and have a conversation, just bring a Word document with some bullet points on with, you know, what you've done, that would just lower all these barriers, which kind of feel like it's a bit glamorised? Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? Well,

Ollie Collard: 42:23

yeah, the whole world of startups is gone. Right? Yeah. Do this podcast that take away that black gloss and inject some reality into

Kim Palmer: 42:30

it? Yeah. So I think I mean, it needs someone needs to customer journey, map it from beginning to end and start again.

Ollie Collard: 42:37

Well, let's have a conversation offline.

Kim Palmer: 42:40

That's not a business idea for me.

Ollie Collard: 42:44

Yeah. How do you manage the demands of being a mother and an entrepreneur? And a perfectionist? Yeah,

Kim Palmer: 42:54

God, that's really hard. Well, I'm, I'm not a perfectionist anymore, it's taken me a really long time to realise that good, is good enough. And that I am more than I'm not. So these sorts of things, I have to constantly tell myself, but I, yet again, like you use that word, how do I balance it all, I've again, I've had to get rid of that idea that I need to be striving for balance. It's a bit chaotic. I feel like life is chaotic. But I have embraced the chaoticness. And obviously, I run a business that is, you know, a huge part of this is around self care. So I am so in tune with what I need. So this week, I'm doubling down on self care, for example, because my body was telling me that I needed to slow down. So a really practical examples of this is that today, coming here to record this podcast, I normally would have squeezed in like five other meetings, I'd be out, you know, networking, I am doing nothing. I've come to do this. And then I'm going home, and I need to retreat because that's what I need. I also I'm very good at working out what days, I have energy to do things and I structure my week in that way. So for example, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I can do a lot of heavy lifting work. And at the end of the week, I'm sort of slowing down and I try to do more Admony work. I have no guilt, zero guilt, about doing things during the in the day for my own health. I walk every single day or I run or I go to Pilates. Every single day. I go and play tennis. I've see friends every single week, because these are the little shots that I need to keep my source of energy. I really do have had to go on a journey with us, which is I am the most important asset and this is not about ego. This is I am the most important asset of this business. I'm also one of the most important assets of my family. So if I'm not right, we've got nothing halfway. So we've got, we've got a big old problem. And I, because I've been there, I don't ever want to be there. Again, it's very easy to have these, you know, comparison points. I'm very good at looking after myself.

Ollie Collard: 45:23

And I think is a bit of a journey. I speak to a lot of founders who've transitioned from corporate career into running their own business. And I think they pick up some of the bad habits that they had in the workplace totally and don't realise they are free to structure their day, however they want,

Kim Palmer: 45:39

oh, my God, I did that for a few years, I had that presenteeism sort of mindsets. Like Alright, I need to sit at my desk from nine to five. And then my husband was like, Can this is one of the reasons why you wanted flexibility. If you don't work on Wednesday, just work on Sunday, like, who cares? Do whatever you want, you're always going to get the work done. But it takes time to it's unpicking all these behaviours that we've learnt. But I think I'm there now. Yeah,

Ollie Collard: 46:06

I was gonna say so I've been running my business for six years. I think it probably took me probably four years realise that? Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So founders heads can be all over the place. Sometimes mine obviously included miners, can you tell me a simple exercise that people can do at home to kind of reclaim their thoughts and feelings?

Kim Palmer: 46:26

Oh, gosh. So it's, there's so many. So one of the things that I has been a total game changer for me, my head is all over the place. I can't stop thinking about ideas every day, I've got new ideas. So I actually designed because I was really struggling, a daily mindset and productivity planner for myself. Where I set an intention in the morning for the day, how do you ask you a couple of questions? How do you feel? How do you want to feel? What are you going to do today to nurture that feeling. And that's just like amazing how that can clear your mind. And then I have a to do list, which is, what are the three most important things to do today. That's it, if you if you don't get those done, then that's not great. And again, if you get them done amazing, and then you have these other to do lists. So I think structuring to do lists, and planning at the start of the day, even if it's just for five minutes are a total total game changer. And then you can capture all the things that are going on inside your head, because you know, you can't stop these ideas from flowing. But I capture them all on my page. And then it's like, they're always there to go back to and not out of your head because I think that was always my worry. I've always that kind of go like, Oh, I'm gonna forget about it. And then you start actually acting on it. And you're like, No, no, come on. Can you still got other things to do? Yeah. So I think that's, you know, one needs to buy this planet, you can just do it yourself, just like plan at the beginning of the day. Also, I'm a huge fan. This is gonna sound like really indulgent, but I do have a power nap pretty much every second day. Because it is in the middle of the day. Because it is overwhelming. I have I'm probably neurodivergent my son's ADHD, I'm probably the same, right. And it's just like constant like chatter, chatter, chatter noise ideas, but other than that, but having a rest in the day, it's only 19 minutes, and we even have a 12 minute session. They both work equally. So it depends on how much time you have just clears the fog, and the mist, and that quietens the noise and then you can get on with doing what you're meant to be doing.

Ollie Collard: 48:44

Love that I'm gonna I'm gonna definitely test that out. And I mean, you know, in a lot of other cultures having a nap or a siesta is common practice, right? Totally.

Kim Palmer: 48:52

We've just we've feel guilty. We're just, you know, it's toxic productivity. Isn't that true?

Ollie Collard: 48:57

And coming back to the first point, like, what I've realised works for me is actually having a not to do list or distractions list totally when that idea comes in. I'm not thinking of it, but I'm not doing it.

Kim Palmer: 49:08

We have to do sometime in the future on our planner, because it's like, you just want to get it down. But you're not doing it.

Ollie Collard: 49:19

Kim, what's one of your favourite failures so far? And what was the lesson that you took from it?

Kim Palmer: 49:24

I don't really talk. I don't think I've ever spoken publicly about this. That's it very early on in my journey. I had a business partner. We didn't start together but then we came on and we also had a parting of ways right. And that was really, for me for my mindset. It was very destabilising and probably took me off task for a lot longer than I probably it should have right And we spent a lot of money, you know, trying to unpick this whole relationship kind of like, it was like going through a divorce a really was was emotional cost money and all that stuff. And, you know, it's time is such a healer. And I look back at that now. And I really wish that we had an, it was a suggestion that she'd actually made enough, I wish we'd done it, which was we should have got together and had a mediated discussion with someone else in the room. And imagine what might have happened, if we'd actually just faced each other, with someone to help us. We never did that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not regretting it, but it's a learning isn't like things could have been very different.

Ollie Collard: 50:50

Well, thank you for sharing that publicly for the first time as well. So building a business can be all consuming. What's the sacrifice that you've made? Starting

Kim Palmer: 51:00

Clementine, there was a period where, because I'm was the main breadwinner at the time when I quit my job. So we had to basically change changed the whole, like, the whole way we were living, you know, live off less, do less, you know, etc. And some people were, you know, move around, we rented accommodation, you know, we couldn't sell our house and you know, everything changed. And some people might look at that and go, Wow, that was a huge thing to go through. But actually, I see it in such a different way. I honestly was like, such an important part of our the businesses journey. It's about how to be frugal. And also our life as a family. Right, and being grateful for the things that you have versus always trying to have more. That's probably sounds a bit woolly. The question. Yeah, I think that it at the time, it was really, really hard. But I look back on it and saying, I feel really privileged that we were able to go through that.

Ollie Collard: 52:17

I mean, what it sounds like is that you're obviously very appreciative of the situation, and you're just grateful for what you had. And yeah, reducing everything and living with less doing less. Yeah. Makes you more grateful in the long term.

Kim Palmer: 52:28

Yeah. And then, and then we didn't want more. We haven't gone back to all but what if we got this and what if we got that I just actually don't care anymore. And I think that's it's made me realise where happiness lies. For us. Again, it's just an everyday it's just like the simple pleasures of life. shinai sounds a bit like cheesy, but it's, that's how we are really so.

Dr Becky Sage: 52:56

We know on this podcast, that being an entrepreneur is so much more than just a job. And Kim has clearly described being an entrepreneur is meant a rethinking of how she does everything in her life. So I wanted to talk a little bit about happiness. And because this is something that I was really reflecting on when Kim was talking about it, and talking about this idea of not chasing the old lifestyle. And surprisingly, I see this a lot in entrepreneurship, it's like people come out of maybe certain jobs in order to be an entrepreneur, and then they try and build their business back to the point where they would have the same kind of job that they'd had before the same salary, the same, you know, the same kind of structures, etc. So do you think sometimes we get a bit lost along the way in terms of thinking about what brings us happiness, and how we might be able to build our businesses to to work with a new way of doing something?

Ollie Collard: 53:51

Well, that's a profound question. I try and try and handle it. So what I would say is like, if you are now a founder, and you've taken your life into your own hands, and you're working on your business, just don't have any limitations or expectations like this is the possibility of where it can go is the limit of your own thinking. In regards to happiness, I've got a great quote here from Dr. Shaun anchor, who's a TEDx speaker and author of The Happiness Advantage. He sums up happiness in the following quote, happiness is the joy you feel towards moving towards your potential. So it's about if you're living with purpose, and working towards your goal, and you're on that journey that will bring you happiness.

Dr Becky Sage: 54:38

It's not the not the endpoint is not we're just trying to get these these big goals and then we'll get to be happy. And I think we see that all the time. And I get it because it's easy to get swept up as an entrepreneur. You're very busy. You've got lots of different stresses potentially. But actually, you've kind of got to start thinking about how do I structure this Live in a way that I can enjoy it and not just be looking towards where we're trying to get to in a year or 10 years, and

Ollie Collard: 55:07

frustration and lack of patience will be big factors where you will, it will try and get you down. But you've just got to overcome them and realise that, as you say, it's definitely the journey, not the destination that you're aiming for.

Dr Becky Sage: 55:22

Yeah, I'm we're here to remind you that entrepreneurship isn't glamorous, is the glamour that you need to make you happy, then maybe there's there's other routes, but I mean, there's there's little moments in entrepreneurship, but we do it because we want to live differently at a really fundamental level. And we want to satisfy different aspects of ourselves and find that joy in being able to, you know, maybe have our own freedom, being able to have advocacy, being able to work towards something that's really purposeful for us, which, you know, following that definition, I think we've just got a again, mindset shift into realising that perhaps this is what your happiness is, even if you haven't recognised it as that as you're going through the journey. Yeah,

Ollie Collard: 56:05

for me, it's definitely the freedom aspect, which is the most rewarding. And I think every hard day you have, you just got to remember that. Ultimately, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. And that should give you some comfort, hopefully,

Dr Becky Sage: 56:18

absolutely. When I've heard that from other people, it's been an important thing to hear. So I think it is such a good thing to remember, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. And I think one of the biggest challenges many people have is money. And the money mindset piece that Kim was talking about, I thought was really important because I have to do some very specific pieces of work around money mindset. And really, again, it came comes back to what you were talking about before about trust, you know, having faith that things are going to work out about realising that you are able to live perhaps more frugally. And that's what you've got to think about doing when you are an entrepreneur, you're not going to have a tonne of cash around all of the time. And being able to trust that the money you need is going to come is something I've had to learn over time, of course, you've got to do the work, you've got to be proactive. But time and time again, I've had it proven to me that that's what happens. As soon as I kind of step back, relax and stop, like trying to hold on really, really tight to the idea of how much money I need to bring in.

Ollie Collard: 57:33

Yeah, I think one of the greatest lessons in entrepreneurship is this notion that in a corporate life or corporate career, like you might get those pay rises, those salary increases, climbing that ladder, so to say, but ultimately, you'll end up spending a lot more with those increases. Whereas entrepreneurship, if you can prove to yourself that you can live frugally, and live within your means, then, when the money does come how much better you're going to be in a financial position and have the right mindset to be able to make an impact with that money. And

Dr Becky Sage: 58:09

it's not hollow, then it's actually got something real behind it. I did a lot of work with Emma Mumford. And she's written a book called positively wealthy. And in that she also talks about, well, what's your definition of wealth? And I guess we've talked about this before in sense of how do we define success? And so I think thinking about that as well, like, what does wealth mean to you, in a really holistic fashion, can help you to shift your money mindset? Yeah,

Ollie Collard: 58:36

I think Kim, definitely, although she's got this investment, is got it focused on the numbers as well, which I think it's really important. Just to give you a kind of anecdote, little story here. When we went to film the episode in London, the first time we did it, there was a train strike. She couldn't make it. I was already on the train. There wasn't affected from Bristol to London, however her train was and I said, you know, maybe could we get a taxi there and go half on the course. And it was going to be about something stupid, like 400 pounds. And she was like, I've got to justify that money to my investors. And it's that justification. Is that a good use of funds? Probably not. We rescheduled and they did it again and got somebody else on the show. But just to show that, yeah, even if you've got funding and you've got this investment, it doesn't mean that you should be spending money willy nilly. Yeah,

Dr Becky Sage: 59:26

absolutely. I said just now about kind of the monies that come in when you let go a little bit boundary, I don't mean let go in terms of staying on top of the numbers. I mean, stop stressing about it and start getting pragmatic about it. Know, your numbers inside out, get in your spreadsheets and like you said, be able to justify it, even if that is just yourself because you're the first investor in this company if you're the founder, so you being able to think that way I think is incredibly helpful and pays dividends literally probably In the future,

Ollie Collard: 1:00:01

literal dividends last ones. Yeah. Something

Dr Becky Sage: 1:00:05

else that perhaps pays literal dividends in the future is when businesses are able to be riding on the fast rivers. And this is a term that I actually heard when talking to an investor the other day, and they said, we're looking for the fast swimmers on the fast rivers. And Kim described this as well. So essentially, what this is, is those macro trends that are, that are trends that are trending at the time and are likely due for a period of time in the future. And so Kim talked about it in terms of mental health, female entrepreneurs, needing to have proof and traction, that is certainly a trend in the investment market right now. You're not able, especially in the UK to get funding to early stage in most cases. So it's, I think it can sometimes be easy to ignore this when you're so passionate about the thing that you want to do on your own in your own little bubble. But the importance of being able to recognise those bigger trends that are going on and how you fit into them, shouldn't be overlooked by entrepreneurs. If

Ollie Collard: 1:01:13

you haven't got your your finger on the pulse, or in terms of what's happening industry, what you know what the market is going by what the trends are, then it's going to be very hard to position your business in that future world. So it's about understanding those trends. But also what I'd say is don't be afraid to potentially go against some of them. I often find if you zag when people are seeking that, often, more often than not, you're actually on to something different. So it's about understanding those trends where the future direction is heading. But where does your business fit within that future world? And can you articulate that story? That's

Dr Becky Sage: 1:01:55

key, because if all you're doing is a what is the current trend? What are we doing right now? What are we seeing, and how are other people doing it, if you're just going to do the same as that, then actually, you're not really going to stand out. And unless you're the person who can become a market leader, because you put the most money into that or for whatever other reasons, you might be able to position yourself as that market leader very early on, you're really not going to be able to get traction in that field. So it's about I love what you said there about it's how are you going to position yourself in that future world. And I think that that's something that it's really important for entrepreneurs to think about. And when you're when you're in those nuts and bolts and doing the day to day, and it can sort of be very easy to turn a blind eye to that and sort of almost fingers in your ears. Lalala like, No, we've been working on this for so long. But actually, again, this is just more data points that you can use in order to position the business and to understand what your strategy should be going forward.

Ollie Collard: 1:02:53

Yeah, Morgan says don't be afraid to be contrarian in terms of your thinking, like innovation, I think is best described as everyone sees the same thing. But you see something that everyone else didn't see. So it's about being bold with being abreast of those changes, and actually, how you position yourself within that. Yeah,

Dr Becky Sage: 1:03:14

which is something that Kim has demonstrated, and I think she's been able to build great success so far, and got Clementine to a great place. But I'd really like to know about what she's got planned in terms of where she's gonna go next.

Kim Palmer: 1:03:31

I think the future is very bright. Last year, I felt completely stuck. And I think the business was stuck. This year, we are stepping in to where we should be going right and Clementine is interesting. When we started this conversation, you said time and time the app. And where we're going is Clementine is not an app. Clementine is a mindset company, right? And it has a number of solutions underneath the app as one. We also create digital therapeutics for brands, which we've done quite a few of now I'm about to do a massive global one. And, you know, we've we started testing our first physical product with the planner, you know, we also see a massive opportunity in the menopause space. So I think Clementine is a brand. It's a brand, right? That will have a place in in women's lives that they care about. And that has offers genuine support that works. That is the like when you whistle it all down it. It will always work and we know that it works. So yeah, I think it's really bright. I think it's big. I say I think it's big. It's big, massive problem. Yeah. And I and I believe that we have the you know, the expertise with learning so much and we have the grace of the goodness of the community. To go into some new places, which is quite exciting,

Ollie Collard: 1:05:03

amazing. And it's great to hear about the expansion of the brands just beyond the digital into lots of different areas as well. And talk to me a bit about the scale of the company now, because you said obviously previously, before funding, you've got 50,000 users. Yes. So where are you know, in terms of Yeah, I mean, to say, well, we've

Kim Palmer: 1:05:20

we've been, again, this is like a whole nother podcast, really, we've been we've had some ups and we've had some downs and trying to work out how we grow sustainably. Right. So for the past few years, we've spent nothing again, on marketing, we decided to make a bet. Not sure it's paid off. But with you, it's a bet that we would try to grow through strategic partnerships. And that is this idea that we could start to build Clementine as an ingredient into other people's products, a mind powered ingredient, right. So we, I think sometimes I have such big ideas that I don't realise that you need to do a couple of these to learn how to actually make it work before we actually went to the biggest brand possible probably fast. And it got lots of learnings, but didn't quite work. But we're sort of getting there now. And so yeah, so we didn't spend on growth. And we decided to sort of turn our focus into creating these partnerships to see if we could grow, what we learned is that we can grow revenue, and we can grow brand awareness. But we won't see user growth from those partnerships. So this year, we're at almost 160,000 women, we will we have started spending again. And that again, that's like quite a big thing for us to do. Because we don't really want to spend our money on marketing, to be honest. We'd rather spend the money creating the solutions that actually help people. But you know, with the investors who are very patient, they're patient as patient capital. You know, we still need to be able to reach a certain scale, right, so we'll spend again, So

Ollie Collard: 1:07:11

Kim, if you had to distil down just one piece of advice to pass on to a early stage entrepreneur, what would that be?

Kim Palmer: 1:07:20

Right? So I mean, there's so many, I don't like giving advice for a start, because everybody's journey is very different. And I think at the beginning, I used to put everyone else up on a pedestal, and almost try and copy them, and realise that that was never going to work.

Ollie Collard: 1:07:36

That's a great piece of advice there. And

Kim Palmer: 1:07:39

I think that one of the things I've had to learn along the way is this, how to get feedback from people and know who to trust and which feedback to bring in. And which feedback to not take in you. You don't have to take on board. Everybody's feedback. Yes, you can listen, but you've got to get very good at filtering stuff out. And trust. This has been the biggest thing for me, trusting my own intuition. So trust your intuition and your vision, and that it's your path. I'd say if you can start there, imagine where you could get to, because I've sort of whoops, I've wobbled a bit along the way. Because I haven't stayed true to what I knew was right for us. Yeah.

Ollie Collard: 1:08:29

Love that. Yeah, having that Northstar is vitally important. Yeah. Where can people find more about you online, but also more about Clementine? So

Kim Palmer: 1:08:39

you can probably come to LinkedIn. For me, I'd say I'm quite active on LinkedIn, I really love LinkedIn. I'm not on Instagram on purpose. But for Clementine, we are definitely active on on Instagram, and just come to our website, which is Clementine app.com. And then you can download the app from the App Store.

Ollie Collard: 1:08:58

Amazing. Thank you. By the way, you had a question for our listeners?

Kim Palmer: 1:09:02

I do. So my question is related to how you make decisions. Would you say that you're more of a person who makes decisions based on intuition, or data on a spectrum? So yeah, that's the question. Great question.

Ollie Collard: 1:09:21

We get some answers to that. Also, she was for you as well. Kim, thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. And thank you so much for your insights as well. Oh, thanks, Ali.

Kim Palmer: 1:09:32

Pleasure.

Dr Becky Sage: 1:09:36

Thanks for the question came, we'll make sure we get that question to the listeners on social media. And we'll get back to you in terms of what the answer is to that question. The future is certainly looking bright for clever and dime. And I think one of the reasons is that they've really got it right in terms of how to use feedback in your business. And that might sound seems really obvious in terms of how well surely you're using feedback is, is something that's quite straightforward to do. But I think it can get very noisy for entrepreneurs, I certainly work with a lot of entrepreneurs who have a tonne of feedback. And they just end up ping pong in all over the place. And it gets overwhelming and it gets confusing. And you start to lose your own sense of kind of what you're trying to do with the business, what we were just talking about at the end of the last part, like what's, what's your unique thinking that you're going to bring into this? So I think it's very important to be able to use feedback effectively, we must have feedback, and we must be listening to our customers and to the world around us. But then we have to be able to synthesise that into something useful. Have you seen this as well with other entrepreneurs? Yes,

Ollie Collard: 1:10:52

sometimes you see entrepreneurs running around like headless chickens, if they are engaging lots with their, with their valuable customers. But ultimately, they've got to process all of that data and make decisions based on it. And to be a bit brash, I'd say, you know, opinions are like a holes, everyone has one. So you can't please everyone. And I would only take advice from people that you're willing to trade places with. So I think it is about definitely engaging your customers getting that feedback, but not getting overwhelmed with it, pulling out those common threads. I mean, you can use AI now to your advantage, but you could have a half an hour phone conversation with somebody, you could record the entire thing, you could get it transcribed, you could pull out the key points, you can do this time and time again, and get build this very large data set and get AI to kind of analyse what the common common threads are in those conversations, and then work out why these are the these are the six problems that we've identified. Well, let's put these on a roadmap, what is the biggest problem we need to solve right now. And is that going to have the biggest impact for us as a business, because sometimes the customers main problem might not push the business forwards in the way that needs to. So it's about understanding all of the different pieces of a jigsaw. And then ultimately making hard decisions at a strategic level, to obviously push forwards the business.

Dr Becky Sage: 1:12:18

And I hope everyone just listened really carefully to what you just said just then because I think that's so incredibly helpful for business owners to if you feel a bit overwhelmed by potential data, or the actual danger of getting feedback, I know some people don't even like to ask because they don't know really how to synthesise that feedback, or perhaps they're scared of what it's going to be, turn it into a process. That's what we should be doing with danger. If if you can start to have a process there, it doesn't become overwhelming, it also then becomes more objective and you can become more objective and have a better perspective in that process. So I really liked those ideas that you just gave us. And people can rewind and listen to that, again, if they need help with that. As you said, it's it's about being able to feed into making the right decisions for the business. And that comes back to the question that Kim was asking about data or intuition. What do you think data or intuition?

Ollie Collard: 1:13:15

It's already hard one, I wouldn't say it's one or the other. It's definitely a combination of the two. Like, if you're a new business launching, like, obviously, you've got to go out and do your your macro research your desk research, and that will give you the quantitative data about where the markets going, how much it's going by, you know, size of the market, all of those wonderful things that you need to know. But actually, it's that primary research piece of the qualitative bit of research, actually, you go out and have those conversations, and you understand where people are coming from how they think. So I think you don't get that if you're just purely basing it on data. Because often data can be skewed and be manipulated to suit your own agenda. And we've got to be very conscious as founders not to do that. So I think you definitely got to be doing both pieces of the jigsaw.

Dr Becky Sage: 1:14:07

Yeah. And I talked about process just now that the processing of data is something you have to be really conscious of in terms of like making sure you're not biassing it. And then also just using that those outputs, whatever they are, as some kind of triangulation or validation, perhaps to other things that you've got going on. And I would also say that I find it difficult to decouple intuition from data actually, it's just a different type of data. It's the data that we've gathered as individuals going through our lives and probably partly by having all those conversations, right, that turns into our intuition. And one thing I always used to find quite hard, was certainly when I was with Sachi internally when you're with a team when you're trying to make decisions, and you realise that you've got a lot more experience, perhaps of engaging with the customers But you don't have that hard data. And I think that you need to be building the right trust in your team and getting that understanding. And again, perhaps this comes from right full circle to your own confidence of knowing that, whatever these feel feelings are that you've got about what is the right way to go. And these kind of clear decisions that you know, you need to make, that this is actually coming from, from data or as much as anything, it's just not necessarily data that has been processed or is very easily kind of demonstrated in a certain way. So I think this is another part of building confidence that you need to do, and saying that your own intuition has a lot of value in it. And as

Ollie Collard: 1:15:41

you say, a lot of this stuff is like the battle inside your own head about the confidence of going out and speaking to customers gathering that feedback, that data, whatever way you're doing it. And I think ultimately, if you're going out and doing the one on one piece, and actually getting those anecdotal bits of information that ultimately, you make these customers feel very valued as well, if we go back to seriously low carb, but all of the engagement that Andy did with his early customers, like, that's how he built his business, right? And let's not underestimate the importance of that. And also that ability to then because you built that connection with them. If you wanted to do a case study or a bit of marketing, it's you can connect the dots and go, Oh, well, I really got to know Susan, who was, this was her backstory, and blardy blardy blar. And she was suffering from X Y, Zed. And actually, that means that you've got your finger on the pulse of exactly who you're helping and how you're helping them. And that's going to help you develop those relationships and ultimately, grow your business. Yeah,

Dr Becky Sage: 1:16:46

there's so many layers to that being able to see the lights of your customers eyes and have those conversations with them. And it builds into so much and including your own confidence and the strategy for the company. So we've had our conversation about whether data or intuition is more important, or you know how we would make decisions. And we want to know how you make decisions. Do you make decisions by via data, or intuition or other Kim wants to know that, so do don't forget to go and check out that question on socials. If you're interested in knowing anything more about Kim and Clementine, and don't forget to go and check out those links. I went and downloaded the app the other day, so I'm having a good, good play with that. And it's sending me lots of nice affirmations every day. So keeping my spirits high,

Ollie Collard: 1:17:34

or some are building to Kim's wonderful community there, Becky, absolutely

Dr Becky Sage: 1:17:38

one of however many they've got in their nice, big community. So Ali, it's time to look back to last week's episode. Could you tell us what people are saying about John from s CVC? And the question that he asked us.

Ollie Collard: 1:17:55

So John had a great question for our listeners, which was, do you see the integration of AI as an exciting opportunity or as a threat to your current way of working and conducting business? The results in and I can reveal that 80% of people voted that it is an exciting addition to their current way of operating their business, with only 20% of people saying that it was going to be a fracked and

Dr Becky Sage: 1:18:26

Ollie, please let us know who is our next guest.

Ollie Collard: 1:18:29

I'm going to be a bit vague this week, Becky? So I caught up with a amazing married couple who made Dragon's Den history. That is all I'm gonna say. So if you want to do a bit of research, I'm sure you're come to the answer online.

Dr Becky Sage: 1:18:45

If you're a Dragon's Den watcher, you might might know who we're talking about. So do come back and listen in next week. Thank you for listening today. If you like what you've heard, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts. And don't forget there's a big selection of previous episodes just search pages and grinded on your favourite podcast player. Thank you for listening to find it and grounded with Ollie collard and Dr. Becky sage. Don't forget to press that follow button to help us to grow the show.